The gentle wife who seeks your faults to cover You don’t deserve; prize naught on earth above her; Keep step and be through life her faithful lover. The new town of Guffey, the liveliest in Colorado, thirty miles from Cripple Creek, is fitly named in honor of James M. Guffey, the successful Pennsylvania oil-producer and political leader, who has big mining interests in that section. The Fonner pool, Greene county, was the oil-sensation of 1897 in Pennsylvania. The Fonner well, struck in March, and territory around it sold for two-hundred-thousand dollars. Elk Fork wore the West-Virginia belt, Peru took the Hoosier biscuit and Lucas county the Buckeye premium. Say, boys, seein’ how fast th’ ranks iz thinnin’— Th’ way thar droppin’ out sets my head spinnin’— An’ knownin’ ez how death may take an innin’ An’ clean knock out our underpinnin’, I kalkilate we oughter swar off sinnin’, Jes’ quit fer keeps our dog-gon’ chinnin’, Start in th’ narrer road fer a beginning’, An’ so strike oil in Heav’n fer a sure winnin’ When up the golden-stairs we goes a-shinnin’. When the biggest well in Indiana flowed oil fifty feet above the derrick, at Van Buren, a local paper noted the effect thus: “The strike has given the town a tremendous boom. Several real-estate offices have opened and the town-council has raised the license for faro-banks from five dollars a year to twelve dollars.” At this rate Van Buren ought soon to be in the van. [Illustration: JOHN VANAUSDALL. WM. PHILLIPS. GEO. K. ANDERSON. F. S. TARBELL. F. W. ANDREWS. ORIGINAL D. W. KENNEY’S ALLEMAGOOZELUM-CITY WELL No 2. CAPT. WM. HASSON. JOHN P. ZANE. HENRY R. ROUSE. ] VII. THE VALLEY OF PETROLEUM. WONDERFUL SCENES ON OIL CREEK—MUD AND GREASE GALORE—RISE AND FALL OF PHENOMENAL TOWNS—SHAFFER, PIONEER AND PETROLEUM CENTRE—FORTUNE’S QUEER VAGARIES—WELLS FLOWING THOUSANDS OF BARRELS—SHERMAN, DELAMATER AND “COAL-OIL JOHNNIE”—FROM PENURY TO RICHES AND BACK—RECITALS THAT DISCOUNT FAIRY-TALES. ---------- “I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and cry, ‘’Tis all barren.’”—_Sterne._ “This beginning part is not made out of anybody’s head; it’s real.”—_Dickens._ “Some ships come into port that are not steered.”—_Seneca._ “God has placed in his great bank—mother earth—untold wealth and many a poor man’s check has been honored here for large amounts of oil.”—_T. S. Scoville, A. D. 1861._ “Ain’t that well spittin’ oil?”—_Small Boy, A. D. 1863._ “Wonderful, most wonderful, marvelous, most marvelous, are the stories told of the oil-region. It is another California.”—_John W. Forney, A. D. 1863._